Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

266 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

manent activity that one could retain for oneself. From this vantage point, it

seems worth noting, the question of free will is badly posed, for it presupposes

the self-world dichotomy that Spinoza disputes. Our individuality is part of the

universe. Since we are not separate from the universe (or God) there is no sepa-

rate, distinct agency—opposed to or wholly different from us—that could use us

as a means. In a world of immanence, there is no final residence for an agency

(Providence) that could pursue strategies of instrumentality, rendering our ac-

tions unfree in a conventional sense. By the same token, this conception of the

universe and the individual as constituted by the wider whole is incompatible

with conventionally conceived free subjectivity: in an immanently conceived

universe, everything is determined. One is always situated in a web of causal fac-

tors and constituted and reconstituted by their changing relationships. There is

no place, no refuge beyond immanent causality, to be.

Hess identifies the construal of activity as a means to an end—rather than

its own immanent reward—as humanity’s ur-curse and points to Spinoza’s no-

tion of activity as inherently pleasurable and its own reward as the liberating

alternative.^84 As Hess theorizes it, the deed or act (Ta t, Selbsttat, or Geistesthat)

constitutes the heart of modernity’s accomplishments and future promise by

uniting conceptual and material action in free praxis: “The free thought-action

[Geistestat] is the center point, from which all of modernity’s endeavors have

issued and into which they all return. It is therefore necessary to explore its

law, structure [Organismus], and consequences. The basis of the free act is the

Ethics of Spinoza, and the present ‘Philosophy of the Act’ is only intended as a

further development of that work.”^85 Hess sees in Spinoza’s philosophy of unity

of spirit and world the all-important bridge between thought and praxis, and

thus a sort of blueprint for the communist unity that Hess sees Europe advanc-

ing toward through the meeting of German philosophy and French social and

political activism.

If Auerbach’s Spinozism authorized his embrace of the imagined ethical

community of the German Volk, Hess’s stressed a radical activist version of Spi-

noza’s ethics that saw the free exercise of thought and the radical reshaping of

social institutions as indissolubly wedded: “The centerpiece of social and intel-

lectual freedom is ethics [die Sittlichkeit], the highest good, the ‘recognition of

God,’ as Spinoza calls it, or the self-consciousness of the ‘absolute Spirit,’ as the

Hegelians, inexactly, put it. It is the spirit’s consciousness of its self-identity in its

becoming different from itself, the overcoming of alterity as something fixed, the

transformation of natural determination into self-determination. Without this,

no equality and no liberty are possible.”^86 Hess leverages a version of Spinozan

variegated unity as the vantage point from which to critique false authority and